It is becoming increasingly popular to send photographs, scanned documents, slide shows, PDF documents and other types of attachments in email messages. Each attachment is provided with a filename and is linked to an email message in a manner that is well known in the art. Often, a single email message may contain multiple attachments as well as multiple recipients.
Attachments that are received by portable electronic devices are typically converted into a device-readable format at a server before being sent to the device for display. The length of the conversion process varies depending on the size and complexity of the attachment as well as the load on the server. It is therefore desirable to reduce the processing time in order to minimize the delay experienced by the device user when opening an attachment.